Tag Archive

Are you smarter than the optimizer? Are you hiding critical information from it? Perhaps your stats are missing, stale, or a bit misleading? I don’t want to get into whether hints are good or bad – they can only be used to accomplish good or bad things. They are often absused – so please don’t take this post as carte …

For some reason I procrastinated setting up my video software on my new work machine. Big mistake. I put together this animated GIF to show some new things in version 4.2: Updated formatter – better support for ANSI joins Opening objects referenced in your execution plans Inserting Hints Not new but underutilized: how to compare plans/AutoTraces One Last Thing… …don’t …

We try to make comparing things easy to do. When you’re troubleshooting, you frequently need to know why A isn’t quite like B. So let’s look at a few scenarios. Execution Plans or Autotrace Runs Run a plan or autotrace. Pin it. Run another. Right-click on one, and compare with the other. Voila. Looking at Objects, Side By Side So …

You want to know how much pain you are going to inflict on the server and network before you run that ad hoc query? An explain plan can give you an idea of how long it might take to run, and tell you how much data it thinks will be involved. Cardinality – Fancy Word, Simple Concept From Wikipedia: “In …

I know you can read, you’re here. But maybe you’re a functioning illiterate. Here’s what I mean. You spend a lot of time in the database writing queries, analyzing data, doing important stuff. Most of the time, things go great for you. You can answer questions for people. You make things happen. The wheels of the business bus go round-and-round. …

Jealousy is not an emotion I generally feel for the SQL Server technology stack. I covet their Twitter camaraderie, but I ‘know’ that Oracle can counter just about anything thrown at it. People that Helped Me with this Post I was reminded that even old dogs can be taught new tricks while monitoring the #SQLSaturday conversation going on in Chicago …

Do you run a 3rd party application that uses Oracle RDBMS under-the-hood? Do you experience performance issues? Frustrated that you do not own the application SQL that is causing the issues? Maybe an upcoming upgrade to 11g might give you some relief. Many of the customers I speak with are unaware of a new 11g feature called ‘SQL Plan Management’ …

Many moons ago, this was a pretty straightforward question. It also had a very easy answer, the DBA owned performance. By that I mean if the database or it’s applications did not perform as expected, it was the DBA who would step in and fix it. Several years ago this began to change. More and more shops started to expect …